Welcome to the third number of CP News, an initiative of
the CP organizing committee. We aim to provide a comprehensive
summary of important news in the area of constraint programming.
The newsletter will be published quarterly in January, April,
July, and October. Please email the relevant editor with any
news, event, report or profile you want published.
To subscribe, please register
here.

Each year, the CP community elects two new members to serve
on the CP organizing committe. The committee decides the
venue of the annual CP conference, program and conference chairs,
and supports activities like the doctoral programme, summer schools,
this newsletter, etc. Following the election this summer, Michela
Milano and Jean-Francois Puget have been elected. The full committee
therefore consists of Krzysztof Apt, Fahiem Bacchus, Christian Bessiere,
James Bowen, Michela Milano, Jean Francois Puget, Francesca Rossi,
Peter Van Beek, Mark Wallace and Toby Walsh. Full results
are available here.

New online journals:

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP) is now free and online.
If you are a TPLP author, you might recall that the Cambridge
University Press has agreed that the accepted versions of the TPLP
submissions are posted in the
Computing Research Repository (CoRR).

We are happy to inform you that thanks to this provision we now have a
free
online version of TPLP that also includes all book reviews
published in TPLP. The online version can also
be reached through the
home page
of the Association for
Logic Programming in Leuven.

We would like to thank Qiu Jiang, a student at the National
University of Singapore, for creating the website and adding to CoRR the
accepted versions of the `missing' papers.
We hope that this small contribution of the logic programming
community will inspire others in promoting a free access to scientific
literature.
We plan to maintain this free online version of TPLP and appeal to
prospective TPLP authors to keep helping us in this endevour.

14 papers were accepted, but only 11 could be scheduled for presentation
given the time constraints. There were five sessions:
non-binary constraints and propagation algorithms, search,
uncertainty, extensions, and applications. There
were more than 30 participants.

Two papers were on non-binary constraints and propagation
algorithms. The first paper by Javier Larosa and Emma Rollon
introduces adaptive consistency with capacity constraints while
the second by Christian Bessiere and Romauld Debruyne presents an
analysis of singleton arc consistency. The three papers on search
covered issues ranging from measuring the search effort by
Christian Bessiere, Bruno Zanuttini, and Cesar Fernandez, to
studying the effect of value ordering for finding all solutions by
Barbara Smith and Paula Sturdy, to techniques that exploit
interchangeability during search presented by Steve Prestwich. Two
papers on uncertainty were presented. Alan Holland and Barry
O'Sullivan presented their work on finding robust solutions for
combinatorial auctions, while Robert St-Aubin and Alan K.
Mackworth's paper introduced a formal framework based on
probabilistic constraint nets to model uncertain dynamical
systems.

Three extensions to the classical framework were
presented. Handling preferences was the concern of the paper by
Steve Prestwich, Francesca Rossi, Kristen Brent Venable, and Toby
Walsh on Constrained CP-nets. Solving over-constrained problems
with MAX-SAT algorithms was presented by Josep Argelich and filip
Manya, while T. K. Satish Kumar work focused on geometric CSPs
with (near)-linear domains and max distance constraints. In
addition, a number of interesting applications were covered by a
number of papers. Michael Marte's paper presents a
constraint-based approach to school timetabling. Peter Gregory,
Alice Miller, and Patrick Prosser compare solving a rehearsal
problem using constraint programming, planning and model checking.
Alan Holland and Barry O'Sullivan propose a constraint-based
approach to flexible generalized vickrey auctions. Finally, Roman
Bartak describes generators of random quasigroup problems.

There was also an invited talk. Hermann Schichl talked about
Mathematical Modeling and Modeling Languages. There was also a
panel on getting your research taken up by industry. The
panellists were Esther Gelle from ABB (Switzerland), Rob Milne
from Intelligent Applications (UK), and Marty Plotkin from Oracle
Corporation (USA). Among other topics, the panel covered issues
such as software patents, staring up your own business, getting
the industry interested in your research, etc. The workshop
proceedings are available online at workshop web page.

AFPLC/JFPLC + JNPC = AFPC/JFPC

June 21, 2004: in Angers, France, the French Association for
Constraint Programming is created. This is a significant step for the
French constraint programming community. Let us get back in time.

June, 1998: in Nantes, France, for the first time the two national
conferences dealing with constraint programming are held in the same
place.

On the one hand, the yearly JFPLC (French-speaking days on Logic and
Contraint Programming) organized by the AFPL (French Association for
Logic Programming) founded in 1995 and which became AFPLC (French
Association for Logic Programmign and Constraint Programming) in
1998. The thirteenth edition took place this year in Angers, France.

On the other hand, the JNPC (National days on practically solving
NP-complete problems) originating from a national working group on
artificial intelligence. This yearly conference was the natural
meeting of all french people working on solving complex problems. It
was informally managed by a steering committee very similar in its
management to the CPOC. Its tenth edition took place this year in
Angers, France.

Since 1998, holding the two conference in one place helped
strengthen the relations between the members of the two
communities, because of the similarity of the handled problems and the
used techniques. The question of merging the two conferences arose
quite naturally.

The idea of a unique association managing the activities of the two
groups (AFPLC/JFPLC + JNPC) has been implemented this year. From this
merging of the two groups emerges a new unique (french-speaking
international) conference :
JFPC (French-speaking days on Constraint Programming)

The main objective of JFPC is to let french-speaking specialists,
share ideas and publish in their mother tongue. However, any
interested person, whatever his language is, is warmly welcome.

The evolution of the constraint programming community in France can be
historically formulated as:
AFPLC/JFPCL + JNPC = AFPC/JFPC

The official aim of the new "young" association is now
gathering all people interested, professionnaly or not, in constraint
programming: its study, its theory, its applications, its evolution,
its teaching and its diffusion. Covered topics include (and are not
limited to): logic and constraint programming and their extensions,
logics, discret and continuous satisfaction problems (SAT, CSP, etc.),
mathematical programming and combinatorial optimisation.

AFPC is managed by an advisory board of 17 people whose president
is Narendra Jussien (LINA, EMN, Nantes) and vice-president is
Franocois Fages (INRIA, France). The new
association has a brand new web
site where information about the life of the
association and its themes are presented.

For the pre-existing association (the AFPLC), becoming AFPC is a new
step forward and an opening. As "Deleting" the "L" is not forgetting their
roots, AFPC is still the
ALP (Association for Logic Programming) representative in
France.